Using Tarot to Mine Your Life for Writing Material

Tarot gives us a beautiful way to explore our lives as we are living them and as we have lived them. In Using the Tarot to Mine Your Life for Writing Material: Tarot Journaling to Know Yourself we will journal to gentle questions about the four building blocks of the tarot deck: the four Aces based on the four elements. All of us are born onto the planet with a body and a pair of hands to use (earth), a heart with which to love (water), a drive and passion to direct our choices (fire), and a mind with which to dream, to think, and to write (air). How we use these four Aces, or how we are challenged or blocked from using them ends up shaping the very story of our lives. 

In this online class, you'll journal to gentle questions and learn tools to connect your experiences to the imagery in the tarot deck. You'll come away with a deeper understanding of yourself, the tarot, and your writing process. This class is offered through Antioch University's online program, Inspiration to Publication.

*New start date: We start March 30, 2020. We will start in May due to the coronavirus crisis. Please don't hesitate to contact me with questions.  Here is the full course description:

Using Tarot to Mine Your Life for Writing Material: Tarot Journaling to Know Yourself—The Four Aces. 

Visit Tarot for Two, where I co-blog with Mary Allen for examples of the ways we connect lived experiences to the tarot cards.

In Person Poetry Class

If you are local, you can always drop in to my Second Saturday Poetry Read and Critique class; we meet from 10-12….you guessed it…every second Saturday of the month. We are an earnest, heart-based group of writers…don’t let our compassion or kindness fool you—we have your best writer self in mind and will encourage the fullest expression of your poet self.

Upcoming Events

I'm blessed to be taking part in Oxnard High School's Writing Festival where I'll be giving readings for literary questions. March 6, 2020 from 8:45-2:15. Details here.

The San Diego Writing Festival will be held this year at the Coronado Public Library. I'll be teaching a class about how to use the Tarot to Write Poetry. This free festival brings fabulous classes, panels, speakers, readings to our community to celebrate the power of storytelling and writing. More details soon. Put in on your calendar: April 4th. 

Upcoming Poetry Publication News:

“Couch Burning,” in Climbing Lightly Through Trees, an anthology honoring Ursula K. Le Guin (Aqueduct Press, 2020)

“Cookies,” in an anthology of poems and artwork based on tarot cards, 78

America We Call Your Name: February 8 Poetry Reading at Beyond Baroque

I'll be reading in Los Angeles from the anthology, America We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2017) along with featured readers Martin Ott, Murray Silverstein, David St. John, and Eliot Schain.

Friday, February 8, 2019 at 8 p.m.

Beyond Baroque

681 N. Venice Blvd.

Venice, CA 90291

Link to Beyond Baroque Facebook Event page

The anthology, born in response to the 2016 Presidential election, combines voices of poets from across America–from red states and blue states, high schools and nursing homes, big cities and small towns–with the voices of poets from other countries and other times. From Virgil and Dante to Claudia Rankine and Mai Der Vang, from Milton to Merwin, from Po-Chiu to Robin Coste Lewis, these voices, now raucous, not muted, now lyric, now plain–join together in dissent and in praise, in grief and alarm, in vision and hope.

What a fertile collection--beautifully organized, powerful in the classroom (I loved sharing it with my poetry students and using it to help us seed new work). I'll even admit I printed out the list of contributors and taped it beside my writing desk just for the joy of seeing the name-field, so diverse, so rich, and so numinous with the energy of the poems in the anthology.

Heres a partial list of other contributors included in the anthology: Elizabeth Alexander, Ellen Bass, Lucille Clifton, Natalie Diaz, Molly Fisk, Terrance Hayes, Robinson Jeffers, Yusef Komunyakaa, Ursula K. Le Guin, Audre Lorde, Czeslaw Milosz, Pablo Neruda, Sharon Olds, Irma Pineda, Adrienne Rich, Evie Shockley, Wislawa Szymborska, Susan Terris, Ocean Vuong, William Carlos Williams, Joseph Zaccardi and more...

If you are unable to attend the reading, but would like to order a copy of the anthology, visit Sixteen Rivers Press.

Here's a link to a post about the process of writing the cento chosen for inclusion in the anthology:

Poetry Meets Tarot Synchronicity: Crafting Centos and Leaning on Your Beloveds